Category Archives: Fertility problems

I presumed I would be looking after the centenarian women I met. But they looked after me

Edna lives just off the M4 in a tiny brick bungalow with a wheelchair ramp. I crawled to her front door. I didn’t knock; I went straight in and put my head on her knee, pushing the Zimmer frame out of the way. And I cried, and she was still and kind and said: “I think you will always miss him. You lost your son, dear.”

On the way to Edna’s I’d had to pull the car over so the animal in me could thrash the air and grope for my dead baby – a primal scream against the loss, the regret and the pain of it all. The burden shifted marginally, briefly almost felt manageable, when I arrived at her house.

The creation of two monkeys brings the science of human cloning closer to reality. But that doesn’t mean it will happen

The cloning of macaque monkeys in China makes human reproductive cloning more conceivable. At the same time, it confirms how difficult it would be to clone a random adult – Adolf Hitler, say – from a piece of their tissue. And it changes nothing in the debate about whether such human cloning should ever happen.

Since the cloning of Dolly the sheep by scientists in Scotland in 1996, several other mammals have been cloned, including dogs, cats and pigs. But the same methods didn’t work so well for primates – like monkeys, and us. That’s why this latest step is significant. It shows that, with a bit of modification, the technique used for Dolly can create cloned, apparently healthy baby monkeys. The pair made this way by scientists at the Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai have been christened Hua Hua and Zhong Zhong.

Researchers pass milestone on developmental path from stem cells to immature sperm, and hint lab-made sperm and eggs may one day be possible

Scientists have come a step closer to mimicking the natural process by which the body creates sperm from stem cells in work that could ultimately provide new treatments for infertility.

Speaking at the Progress Educational Trust annual conference in London this month, Azim Surani, director of germline and epigenetics research at the University of Cambridge’s Gurdon Institute, said he and colleagues had passed a significant milestone on the path to producing sperm in the laboratory. The team is thought to be the first to have reached the halfway point on the developmental path from human stem cells to immature sperm.